Artists who paint with their feet have ‘toe maps’ in their brains

Twoartists who paint with their toes have unusual neural footprints in theirbrains. Individual toes each take over discrete territory, creatinga well-organized “toe map,” researchers report September 10 in Cell Reports.

“Sometimes,having the unusual case — even the very rare one — might give you importantinsight into how things work,” says neuroscientist Denis Schluppeck of theUniversity of Nottingham in England, who was not involved in the study.

Theskills of the two artists included in the study are certainly rare. Both wereborn without arms due to the drug thalidomide, formerly used to treat morningsickness in pregnant women. As a result, both men rely heavily on their feet,which possess the dexterity to eat with cutlery, write and use computers.

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Thebrain carries a map of areas that handle sensations from different body parts;sensitive fingers and lips, for example, have big corresponding areas. But so far,scientists haven’t had much luck in pinpointing areas of the human brain thatrespond to individual toes (although toe regions have been found in the brainsof nonhuman primates). But because these men use their feet in unusuallyskilled ways, researchers wondered if their brains might represent toes a bitdifferently.

Thetwo artists, along with nine other people with no special foot abilities, underwentfunctional MRI scans while an experimenter gently touched each toe. For many people,the brain areas that correspond to individual toes aren’t discrete, says neuroscientistDaan Wesselink of University College London. But in the foot artists’ brains,“we found very distinct locations for each of their toes.” When each toe wastouched, a patch of brain became active, linking neighboring toes to similarlyneighboring areas of the brain.

Tom Yendell, who was born without arms, creates detailed paintings with his feet and mouth. “I just have a different way of doing things,” the British artist said in an interview with the online magazine Disability Horizons. That difference can be mapped in his brain, a study finds.Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists

Thefinding was enabled by using a particularly powerful MRI machine that had the strengthto reveal the relatively small and hard-to-see toe maps, Schluppeck says.

Researchers don’t yet know when this map in the brain gets drawn, or whether intense toe training might allow people to create toe maps in their brains — an idea that draws skepticism. Wesselink suspects that the artists’ toe maps were created very early on, and sharpened over decades of sophisticated toe use. “When you use your body in a different way, from very young, your brain develops differently,” he says.

Dan Feldman, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, describes the mark that the toes leave on the brain as a kind of sensory autobiography. “Here, these two individuals had a particularly unique sensory experience, and one can see the trace of that in their brains.”

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